cellio | Entries tagged with tech

Dear LJ brain trust,

Upgrading a browser is a dangerous thing because you never know what'll happen to your add-ons (or UI experience in general, really) until you get there, and rolling back isn't always smooth. In the past I've used my iBook to test-drive new versions of Firefox before committing on the machine where it really matters, but apparently OS 10.4 is no longer good enough for Firefox (and the iBook isn't good enough for newer operating systems, which I knew when I bought it).

I was hoping that I could just visit the pages at the Mozilla add-ons page for the add-ons I care about to find out the latest versions of Firefox on which they're supported. No dice. I can apply Google one at a time to look for evidence one way or the other -- for example, I found a Stylish user script to change something in the Firefox 8 UI, which suggests it works with Firefox 8 -- but is there a better way?

I know some of you are already using Firefox 7 or 8, so just in case there's overlap in our add-ons, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you have direct knowledge (and for which versions of Firefox) for any of the following: AddBlock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, Greasemonkey (I assume, but...), HTTPS-Everywhere, Image Zoom, NoScript, Stylish. I use others, but these are the important ones.

Thanks.

PS: I'd also appreciate hints about major UI changes.

To get my TiVo to shift out of DST I reboot it? Is that what I did last time and I managed to forget? There's no way to manually set the time, and apparently no less-invasive way to ask whomever it asks about the time to go do that. Weird.

Lately I've been having to reboot the TiVo once or twice a week to get it to stop losing part of the signal (sometimes it freezes video; other times it drops sound). So I guess I would have noticed this before too much longer. I don't know what the reduction in reliable uptime means -- aging hardware, dropped support for older models, gremlins, or what. But now I can stop adding an hour to recordings because of clock error, which is handy.

We have joined the ranks of the smartphone-enabled. We had been Verizon customers and the Droid Bionic looked tempting on specs, but we ended up going across the street to T-Mobile (it seems safe now that AT&T is unlikely to buy them), where they're selling an all-you-can-eat plan for less than Verizon's metered plans and the staff were very helpful besides. (By comparison, I was only able to use a dummy Bionic at Verizon and the sales guy didn't seem to understand my need to use the phone before deciding.)

We were both having trouble with the touch keyboard; I assume that's something you just have to learn to do. So we both chose the MyTouch Slide (4G), which also has a physical keyboard that we were both able to use easily. I'll try to transition more to the touch keyboard, but meanwhile I can still complete a Google search or type a text message or the like on the first try when I need to.

(In case you're wondering, Dani decided that if he really really wants the iPhone 5 when it eventually comes out, he can buy an unlocked one and switch over to it.)

So what apps are must-haves? (Android 2.3.)

Edit: How do y'all post to LJ from your phones? I downloaded both "Livejournal" and "LJ Beetle"; in both cases I could figure out how to compose a post just fine, but could not find anything like a "post" or "send" button. Once I've got a buffer to send, what then?

I'm posting this to both LJ and G+.

When I joined LJ there were three levels of publicity for posts: public, friends-only, and private. Years later they introduced filters, so you could group your friends into buckets for both reading and access. Either you could not at the time put a post in multiple filters or I did not know that you could, so I ended up creating some hierarchical security filters. For example, some posts would be restricted to the "best buddies" filter, others to the "know pretty well" filter, and others to the "know" filter. A "best buddy" was therefore in all three groups. This is a royal pain to administer on LJ (you can't put a group in a group), and I've been moving to another model now that I can. I may never get around to correcting the older entries, though.

I would like to not have such a mess with G+. I note that G+ (unlike LJ) tells you right there on a person's page what group (er, circle) you've put that person in. I haven't put anybody in multiples, but I assume that if I did they would all show up.

So I'm thinking that what I want to do is to put everybody in exactly one security filter, and then make posts visible to all applicable filters. Instead of having a person in multiple filters, I would have a post in multiple filters. Does this seem right to y'all? Are there other factors I should be thinking about?

On LJ I post almost everything publicly, but it looks like G+, with its ability to make posts to specific individuals, is likely to involve more non-public posting. I can't tell yet. By the time I know, it will be too late to go back and fix my circles if I get this wrong. So I'd like to hear people's thoughts now, while everybody is in one big "acqaintances" bucket awaiting sorting.

Note that I am not talking about reading filters here, and I don't intend to mingle them. I might trust somebody deeply but not want to give his 20 posts per day high priority, y'know? Reading filters can help manage that.

Edit: To clarify, my current thinking is to put each person in exactly one security filter and in one or more reading filters.

Someone sent me an invitation to Google+ last Friday, which didn't work after repeated tries. Yesterday two other people sent me invitations, which arrived tonight (so a one-day delay). This time it worked.

First I had to get a newer version of Firefox. I'd been meaning to move from 3.0 to 3.6 but an extension I like wasn't going to be supported, it said. Turns out they built it into the baseline, so all is fine there. (Rendering in 3.6 looks...different. Can't pinpoint it.) Google and Mozilla are both strongly pushing me to move to Firefox 4, but I remember hearing rumblings of problems there, including problems using LJ. If you're using FF4, please comment about any diminished usability you've encountered. For critical functionality -- operating systems, cars, browsers, etc -- I am not an early adopter.

So ok, I have a G+ account. If you're there and care to let me know you exist, please do. If you've figured out useful patterns, please share that. One I figured out right away (so tell me if there's a reason this is wrong): since you can share a post with any number of circles, stay away from any notions of nested circles or hierarchical circles: given the existence of acquaintances, friends, and best-buddies, put somebody in exactly one of those. Of course, there may be orthogonal circles too; that's different. (E.g. I don't currently see the need to have an SCA circle, but if I did it would include some friends, some best-buddies, and some people who aren't in any other circle.)

Yes, I acknowledge the irony of posting on LJ to discuss G+ best practices. :-)

Edited to add: FF 3.6 annoyingly changed how new tabs are placed. New tabs should go to the far right, not immediately after the current tab, thank you very much. This page has some rather colorful language, but it did tell me how to fix it. (I assume I will have to do that with FF4 and 5, too.)

Google Maps almost failed me this morning. That's never happened before. Those "M" guys used to get things wrong so much that I couldn't rely on them at all; they even managed to leave out a major state road once, telling me that I could exit the interstate and get onto such-and-such road that was miles and miles away. And those "Y" guys led me on some merry romps a couple times. But Google Maps had always given me what I needed with a smile and useful photos besides.

This morning I had to run an errand in Wilkinsburg before work. I don't particularly know the wilds of Wilkinsburg, but it's not the land of unnamed dirt roads or anything like that. I was a little surprised that Google's directions didn't actually have me turn onto the street named in the address, but a street number of "xxx02" is likely to be at a corner, so that seemed ok. So, armed with directions and Street View of the key intersections I didn't already know (Street View has made my life so much easier in this land of sometimes-inadequate road signs), I headed off... and at the end of the directions found myself at the end of a road facing an iron gate. Oops.

So I called my destination, told them where I was, and asked how to recover. How far was I from such-and-such road? Sorry, not from around here -- never heard of such-and-such road. Ok, I should go back to other-such-and-such road and... wait, never encountered that one on my way here. We went back and forth a couple times and I said I guessed I was going to have to reschedule and get better directions. I repeated what I had said at the beginning of the conversation: I was at the end of such-and-such road facing an iron gate with an "authorized personnel only" sign and no other markings.

Wait, the guy said, is it a blue sign? Yup. Could I see a white building beyond the gate? Yup. He told me to wait. A couple minutes later somebody came to open the back gate so I could drive in. Weird!

So it worked out in the end (costing me 10 minutes or so), but it was very puzzling.

We've been holding off on replacing our phones (contract is up) because of the iPhone rumors. We are committed to Verizon.

I'm largely agnostic between iPhone and Droid. I suspect that either would meet my needs nicely; I have a slightly better gut feeling about the Droid but it's probably not significant. My needs are largely about having the internet in my pocket -- easy, legible web browsing and email primarily, only passing interest in video, and I don't wear earbuds so music capabilities don't matter all that much. (I have an iPod Nano for driving.) One thing I do want, though, is a digital recorder, which I think both can do. I've never had a smartphone before, though I've used others' from time to time, so this is largely new territory for me.

It sure sounds like -- specifically on Verizon -- the Droid beats the iPhone on speed and future-proofing. The iPhone is locked into the 3G (CDMA) network and the Droid uses LTE, which I understand to mean 4G or at least faster 3G. Do I have that right? Any plan/phones we buy now will have to hold us for two years. (I know that "4G" is something of a misnomer currently.)

As I said, I don't have strong opinions favoring one over the other. I invite those of you who do to evangelize. :-) (Also, if you're evangelizing about the Droid, I'd like to hear comments on specific phones, since there are choices there.)

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

I received a Kindle as a birthday present (with recognition all around that this was an experiment in many ways). I have no prior experience with e-books; thus far everything I have read has been either on paper or in a web browser, and I've established that I don't have the patience and/or ergonomic satisfaction to read lengthy works via the computer. (Dani reads novels that way sometimes, but I really want to read novels while sitting in a comfy chair with optional feline accessories.)

Yes yes, I'm concerned about both DRM and Amazon's pricing policies. That's not what this entry is about.

So, first look: reading is comfortable. ( Read more... )

It's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:

From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.

shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.

Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization of the gulf oil spill, linked by siderea.

And speaking of interesting visualizations, dagonell posted this depiction of Earth, from tallest mountain to deepest ocean trench.

Also from dagonell: every country is the best at something, though, as he points out, some fare better than others.

This visualization isn't about the planet; it's about the changes in Facebook privacy over time.

Not a visualization: How to keep someone with you forever through the power of sick systems. Linked by lots of people; I first saw it from metahacker. I have not lived that kind of abuse, for which I am very thankful, but this tracks with what I've heard.

And on the lighter (err) side: a light saber strong enough to burn flesh -- for sale for $200. Wow. And yikes. Link from astroprisoner.

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

I am home from Pennsic. It was fun -- good music, good camp, visited with some but not all friends, weather was mostly fine. More later. It began inauspiciously: a couple hours after I arrived it rained, followed by rain, followed by a storm (just for some variety, you know), followed by rain, and then a sprinkle (you tease!) followed by rain, followed by... you get the idea. That went on for about a day and a half (with two camp cars stuck in the mud trying to park) and then it cleared up. And as I said, it was fun otherwise. Rain is good for the land; we just need to work on distribution over time. :-)

While driving to pick up Erik from Mary's Assisted-Living Resort and Spa, Feline Edition (everything was fine, no problems), my other cat-sitter called. I don't use the phone while driving, so I returned the call a few minutes later and it went to voicemail. A few minutes after that he returned the call and my phone never rang (went straight to voicemail), just like Mary's call to let me know she was ready for Erik hand-off. But between those two calls the phone rang normally. This happens every now and then, seemingly randomly, and has happened with multiple phones. I assume the problem is Verizon, not my phone. How bizarre.

What'd I miss here? (And in the world, I suppose, but I have a pile of newspapers to help with that. Yes, I'd rather get the obsolete-by-the-time-I-see-them papers (and have a trusted party bring them in) than tell a stranger that the house he comes to every day will be vacant for a week...)

Notes to self (and any interested onlookers):
( technology, processes, playback options )

Dani and I saw a performance by Second City last night. It was a mixed bag -- some very funny bits, some that fell flat for me, and more scripted than improv (which surprised me). I hadn't realized that Second City is sort of a franchise; there are several troupes out there using the name. I assume they share base material. (This show was, in part, customized for Pittsburgh, some in ways that could be easily reused and some not.) The Second City we saw in Toronto years ago was doing something akin to modern commedia dell'arte; the local show was (mostly) more-conventional comedy sketches. Still fun, as I said -- just different. (I think my favorite was the sketch where the teenager's mom starts answering the instant messages on his computer. Serves the kid right for not using a password, I say. :-) )

Someone local took a few thousand dollars and ran in the NH presidential primary, and he actually came in ahead of some of the "real" candidates. The local newspaper reports his reaction to receiving this news thus: "Son of a (gun), no (kidding)? That's (really) amazing." Or something like that, anyway. :-)

Commenting on the FBI getting its wiretaps shut off for non-payment of bills, xiphias posted this story that made me laugh. I'm not saying I believe it -- just that it made me laugh.

If you've read a little talmud, or haven't but still laughed at the halacha of Xmas, you will probably enjoy Tractate Laundry, linked by velveteenrabbi.

Pleo, a robotic dinosaur reminiscent of Aibo, looks like it would be a fun geek-toy. I wonder what the cats would do. (No, I am not going to spend that kind of money to find out. :-) )

I realized tonight that we have more phones (plugged in, on the landline, I mean) than we get (legitimate) calls in a month. Um... I'm not sure what that says about us. (Why do we have a landline? Aside from the general-precautions factor, because there is one use case not covered well by cell phones: the caller just needs to reach, or leave a message for, the household, and not a specific member.)

Friday at work I completed a big merge of my project's code to the main branch in source control. (Yeah, two hours before leaving for a four-day weekend, but I'd done a lot of testing first.) I've learned some new things about Perforce (source-control system) and our build system. I have also learned that while I can do this sort of configuration management, I really, really want us to hire someone who actually wants to do this stuff on a regular basis.

This morning I was asked if I could read torah next Shabbat. ("How much?" "As long as it's a valid reading, I don't care what you do." "Ok.") This does get better with practice; I don't think I would have been able to learn a non-trivial chunk in less than a week a year ago. Cool.

Thursday we got email from our Hebrew instructor. She is, alas, sitting shiva in Israel, so she sent mail to tell us that (1) class was on anyway as originally scheduled and (2) we'd have the sub again. Only three people showed up; the sub told me that happened at the last class (three weeks ago) too (different three people; that was the night my in-laws were in town, so I missed it). The sub is good, so I hope she's not taking that personally. The bad student I previously wrote about wasn't there, so we actually covered new material. I suggested to the sub that she send email to everyone with the assignment and what we would be doing next week; with luck this will innoculate us some against "but I don't know this!" whines from people who miss classes and don't do the homework. We'll see.

I had a nice conversation with the sub on the way out of the building, and then for half an hour after that, about theology, observance, the local community, learning languages, and the like. That was pleasant. (And hey, we now have each others' email addresses...)

Today we visited with my family. They do Christmas, so Dani and I still do the gift thing with them for their sake. My parents got me two more volumes of Rashi's commentary on torah (yay!), and we got a bunch of other goodies. In a moment of "oh, you did that too? oops", both my parents and my sister got us nice tea assortments. Tonight we cleaned out the tea cupboard (I've been meaning to prune it for a while); who knew that tea had sell-by dates? (This revelation came when considering a box that neither of us remembered buying.) Mmm, new, fresh tea.

We got my sister an iPod (nano), which she was pretty excited about. She does not have a computer, but she has access to several nearby (her kids, our father, and if worse comes to worst she can come to our house, though it's farther for her). She has a long commute and no CD player in her car, so I figure she'll spend an afternoon loading a bunch of CDs onto her iPod and be good for a few months before needing to do it again. Not having a computer of her own shouldn't be a huge hardship, despite the protests of her kids. (We bought her an adapter to charge it from house current and an adapter for playing in her car.)

My father just got a laptop (Macbook), apparently prompted in part by the thought during their trip to Italy that it would have been convenient to have. (Duh; if I'd thought of it I would have lent them my iBook for that trip.) So he's now playing with Leopard, 'cause that's what came installed. He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Tomorrow I'm getting together with friends to play a game of "Dogs in the Vineyard", an unusual role-playing game I previously wrote about. This should be fun!

The project for which I'm tech lead had its first release today. Yay. Now maybe I'll have more brain cells for other tasks. :-)

Heard from Dani while he was playing Diablo with a friend: "The client is willing, but the server is weak".

Time to clear out some of the browser tabs:

If you use a radio adapter to get signal from your MP3 player to your car stereo, you might find this search engine for empty FM bands handy (from

cahwyguy, I think).

Tech-support inspirational poster (courtesy of

dr_zrfq).

The great pizza-orientation test (I forget where I found this).

Iraq by the numbers collects together some interesting statistics in one place.

This afternoon my (relatively-new) cell phone made a noise I hadn't heard before. (Kind of disturbing, actually; must try to fix.) When I investigated, I found a text message from a coworker reporting that his wife had just seen for sale (location given) something I had recently said I'd been having trouble finding. This prompted several immediate thoughts:

1. My plan does text messages?

2. How do people learn to type on those things? It took me at least a minute to compose my two-word reply. (Skipping punctuation would have been faster but out of character.) He sent a grammatically-correct paragraph without any cutesy IMisms. Granted, I don't know what device he used to send it.

3. Where did he get my phone number? (I can ask him that one tomorrow.) My land-line number is readily available, but I haven't given my cell number out to coworkers. I tried Googling for my own number and found sites willing to sell it to me but none willing to give it to me.

Heh. I learned some things today, and will learn one more tomorrow when I ask my coworker about #3. Meanwhile, purchase mission accomplished thanks to this message.

My new cell phone has a camera, as previously mentioned. Some genius thought it would be a good idea to let people take pictures with the phone closed. (Why? You have no viewfinder in that case. Just open the phone and frame your shot!) I have read the documentation and attempted to send email to the manufacturer, but thus far I have not figured out how to stop taking pictures of the inside of my pocket. Whee.

A coworker is trying to place some puppies (black lab mix) rescued from the middle of a road. If you're local and interested, let me know. (This and a photo is all the information I have.)

Since my session of the Melton class was cancelled this year, I was able to return to the SCA choir that practices on the same night. This is a good group, and I'm happy with how quickly I'm picking things up (or back up) again. We'll be performing at an event in a few weeks; I hope the merchant who is making me garb in one of the mandated colors delivers in time. After that, it looks like we'll start working on the Rossi Kedusha -- yay! It's a pretty piece, and it's been lingering in the files ever since a previous director requested a typeset version and then didn't use it.

After the first couple days we've had good sukkah weather. The final holiday of the season starts tomorrow night, Sh'mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Sh'mini Atzeret is, err, a mandated holiday without any real "stuff". The rabbis later added Simchat Torah to this holiday, when we finish the annual torah reading and start right up again. It's meant to be a big party. I haven't yet been to a congregation that really gets the "dance" thing; we kind of manage a somewhat-bouncy skip around the room (while carrying torah scrolls). Perhaps this year I will take advantage of the fact that traditional congregations do Simchat Torah a day later, and see what I can find Thursday night. Or not; I'll decide at the last minute. (A couple years ago there was a big party on a blocked-off street near my house, but we were on our way somewhere. It wasn't there last year.) To be clear: I'm not dissatisfied with my congregation; I'm just curious.

I'll be reading the first aliya of B'reishit (Genesis) both Wednesday night and Thursday morning. That should be fun!

Dear Lazyweb,

My new cell phone comes with a camera. That's not why I bought it (I'm indifferent to cameras), but, well, so long as it's there... But -- how do I get the photos off the phone and to someplace where they can do some good (i.e. my computer)? Asking Google suggests that I buy a cable and some software, assuming I can find some that's compatable with my phone, which so far isn't working out for me.

I know it's possible to post photos to LJ, so I went down that path, but I got blocked on "enter your cell phone's email address in the authorization list" (my cell phone's what? How would I know?), and side-effects of my Google searches suggest that Verizon is going to charge me for that anyway. Is that the case? For those of you who post pictures, what are you doing?

I wish that my iPod (nano, in case it matters) did volume-balancing for playlists. If I play an album everything's generally fine because the publishers of the album made track volume self-consistent (usually), but that doesn't help so much if you assemble a playlist from multiple albums. Publishers don't always agree on the same volume standards. It's irritating to have to adjust volume from track to track.

Editing the tracks themselves isn't the answer, unless you edit every track you might ever play. Every track is automatically part of at least three playlists -- album, artist, and genre -- along with whatever playlists you create. This needs to be a playback option, not an edit of the source data.

It seems hard to believe that this isn't there, but I can't find it. Now granted, the UI for the iPod isn't that intuitive to me [1], so it might really be in there and just not covered in the documentation that came with the iPod, but Google seems to agree that it's not there. How frustrating, and surprising.

[1] For example, I am still utterly mystified by what sequence of key-presses I accidentally issue from time to time that lands me in a "rate this song" mode with no clear way to abort.

I don't care about iPhone at all, but the announcement of AppleTV caught my interest. I'd probably pay $300 for a device that lets me dump the cable service (depending on what content costs). I don't watch a lot of TV but I don't want to watch what I do watch on my computer; this fills a real need for me. Alas, it appears (from Apple's site) that my plain old TV, bought about five years ago, can't talk to this new box; they use the words "widescreen" and "enhanced definition", neither of which I think applies to my TV (assuming "widescreen" means 16:9 instead of the standard 4:3 aspect ratio -- why that should make a difference when they could just letterbox is beyond me). They can make an allowance for wired networks but not for recent-but-not-current TVs? Bummer.

Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.

I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:

( Read more... )

I've entered the 21st century: I now have an iPod (nano), a birthday present from Dani. This was totally unexpected; I haven't had portable music since way back when I had a Walkman (TM). But I'd been lamenting the hassle of moving CDs between the home and the car (the one you want is always in the wrong place), and this solves that. Dani also got me an interface between the iPod and the car stereo; it broadcasts via FM, raising questions (not answered in the documentation) about signal distance. Can I end up in conflict with the guy behind me at the traffic light? Time may tell, nor not. (Neither Dani nor I is really an earbud kind of person.)

The itty bitty iPod comes with an itty bitty manual. Fortunately (I suppose), also a short one. (I read it with a magnifying glass.)

The UI seems a little jumpy, and I do hope there's a global switch so that turning it on requires intentional action. As it is, just brushing the face sometimes turns it on, which can't be good for battery life.

I haven't used iTunes before, and parts of the interface are (deliberately?) counter-intuitive for Windows, but I think I've got the gist of it. So far I'm just working at the album level; I haven't created playlists. I assume that eventually I'll have too much music in iTunes for the iPod and I'll need to select what to put on the iPod, but I've only scanned about half a dozen CDs so far so that's not an issue yet.

Cool toy!

My ancient and venerable digital camera has been somewhat unreliable in a way that's not worth repairing, given that it's ancient and venerable. (I often tend to hang on to hardware past the point when I really should just upgrade anyway. Exhibit A: my HP LaserJet 5L, which has mostly served me well for more than a decade.) But hey, digital-camera technology has certainly gotten better, and low-end photographers like me don't need all the expensive bells and whistles. So today I set out to improve my photographic situation before Pennsic.

Oh, Cannon PowerShot A530, I think we are going to have a long and pleasant relationship. I don't know what half your advanced functions even mean yet, but I will enjoy finding out. The camera is a good size for my hand, has controls that are tight enough not to be mushy without being difficult, and seems to take good pictures. (The real test of that involves a different operator, I suspect.)

It comes with software that I'm ignoring for now; my computer has a built-in card reader and that works just fine.

Conversation with the sales guy while discussing features I wanted:
Me: I wouldn't object to re-using my current memory cards.
Him: What do you have?
Me: Compact flash.
Him: Almost no one uses that any more.
Me: Bummer.
Him: A gig of SD (what everyone uses now) costs $25; do you care?

I'm pretty sure my current 128MB card cost rather more than that. :-) (And on the other hand, given how cheap memory is, you'd think that as a gesture of goodwill, the camera would come with more than a 16MB card. I didn't bother to peel off its plastic.)

Erik is continuing to recover. He might be able to come home tomorrow -- yay!

Our congregation is currently looking for an associate rabbi, and I managed to get myself onto the search committee. I'm glad to be able to play this role, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to see this process up close. We conducted our first phone interview this morning; in some ways it's not that different from interviewing programmers. Sure, the domain is rather different, but either way, you want to try to figure out how the candidate goes about solving problems, how he works with others, and so on.

The user interface on my cell phone is worse than it first appears. Someone left me voice mail, which I listened to but didn't immediately act on. I figured I could always go back to the "recent messages" menu item to re-hear it. Nope -- no way to do that through that interface. The secret for getting to the voice-mail box is that it's on speead-dial #1 -- which is in the manual, but I shouldn't have to consult the manual for something like that. Putting it on speed-dial is fine, but it should also be linked from the menu that is otherwise about messages. Sheesh.

Dani brought home a book of poetry called Now We Are Sick. That, and that it is edited by Neil Gaiman (and Stephen Jones, who I otherwise don't know) should tell you something about the amount of twistedness in the content.

My copy of "Clam Chowder: Kosher" (new DVD) arrived yesterday. This is a collection of songs from several years' worth of concerts that they actually have publication rights for (mostly traditional, out-of-copyright, and self-written material). It's a good collection. That it was recorded from the back of the hall is obvious; the resolution isn't as good as you'd expect from settings where they can put cameras everywhere they want. But it's good enough. The only regret I have in watching it is that I know there were some fun "audience gags" at some of those concerts (I was there), but none of those were included. Some can't be becuase the songs weren't; for example, the Vegetable Liberation Front, or maybe it was People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables, showed up for "Carrot Juice is Murder" one year, but that song isn't on the DVD. On the other hand, I remember uniformed flag-waving folks parading in for one performance of "Ye Jacobites By Name", which is on the DVD, but that's not the version they used. One of the things that makes Clam Chowder special is the relationship they have with the audience; I wish that had come out more on the DVD.

Monica

brain trust: Firefox 7, 8, neither?

wait, what?

we now join the 21st century, already in progress

getting security groups right

G+

the end of a perfect record

Verizon iPhone?

some reading material

Kindle: first impressions

link round-up (including some nifty visualizations)

short takes (link round-up, mostly)

family visit and technology

home from Pennsic

notes on the digitizing-music project

random bits

last few days

short takes

ah, technology

random bits

what good is a camera-phone if the pictures are trapped there?

iPod frustration

technological disappointments

new toy

digital camera

random bits

Expand Cut Tags

Syndicate